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Sometimes it seems to me that all of life is a struggle to contain the natural impulses of the body and spirit, and that what we call character represents only the degree to which we are successful in this endeavor.

Anita Shreve

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Anita Shreve
Age: 71 †
Born: 1946
Born: October 7
Died: 2018
Died: March 29
Journalist
Novelist
Screenwriter
Writer
Dedham Massachusetts
Anita Hale Shreve
Life
Successful
Impulses
Call
Contain
Natural
Represents
Spirit
Endeavor
Seems
Impulse
Character
Degree
Body
Degrees
Sometimes
Struggle

More quotes by Anita Shreve

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Sydney discovers that she minds the loss of her mourning. When she grieved, she felt herself to be intimately connected to Daniel. But with each passing day, he floats away from her. When she thinks about him now, it is more as a lost possibility than as a man. She has forgotten his breath, his musculature.
Anita Shreve
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But how do you ever know that you know a person?
Anita Shreve
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Children don't heal as well.. they change.. they mutate with disaster and make accomodations.
Anita Shreve
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The weight of his losses finally too much to bear. But not before he has known the unforgiving light of the equator, a love that exists only in his imagination, and the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
Anita Shreve
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Love is not simply the sum of sweet greetings and wrenching partings and kisses and embraces, but is made up more of the memory of what has happened and the imagining of what is to come.
Anita Shreve
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Reunions are always fraught with awkward tensions - the necessity to account for oneself the attempt to find, through memories, an ember of the old emotions.
Anita Shreve
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A person walks into a room and says hello, and your life takes a course for which you are not prepared. It's a tiny moment (almost-but not quite-unremarkable), the beginning of a hundred thousand tiny moments and some larger ones.
Anita Shreve
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Is imagination dependent upon experience, or is experience influenced by imagination?
Anita Shreve
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If you're skating on thin ice, you might as well dance.
Anita Shreve
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To be relieved of love, she thought, was to give up a terrible burden.
Anita Shreve
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I learned that night that love is never as ferocious as when you think it is going to leave you. We are not always allowed this knowledge, and so our love sometimes becomes retrospective.
Anita Shreve
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the enduring struggle to capture in words the infinite possibilities of a life not lived.
Anita Shreve
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And she thought then how strange it was that disaster--the sort of disaster that drained the blood from your body and took the air out of your lungs and hit you again and again in the face--could be at times, such a thing of beauty.
Anita Shreve
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I wonder this: If you take a woman and push her to the edge, how will she behave?
Anita Shreve
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I think about the hurt that stories cannot ease, not with a thousand tellings.
Anita Shreve
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And so a person can never promise to love someone forever because you never know what might come up, what terrible thing the person you love might do.
Anita Shreve
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Love is never as ferocious as when you think it's going to leave you.
Anita Shreve
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Once you tell your first lie, the first time you lie for him, you are in it with him, and then you are lost.
Anita Shreve
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In the time it takes for her to walk from the bathhouse at the seawall of Fortune's Rocks, where she has left her boots and has discreetly pulled off her stockings, to the waterline along which the sea continually licks the pink and silver sand, she learns about desire.
Anita Shreve
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I have always been faithful to you if faithful means the experience against which everything else has been measured.
Anita Shreve